She had not slept since the night before the records hall, and by the following dusk the world had acquired a faint hard edge, like a picture cut out and pasted onto another picture.
She spent the day at the bins and listened to nothing. She sorted plates by their stamps and nothing else. She left the brass cup alone. She kept her eyes off the wall above the bench, where the sentence stood in chalk under the three steps; she could feel it there, at her back, all day, the way one feels a person standing in a doorway. Tavin did not mention it, or the widow, or the collar, or the stub. He mentioned nothing at all. He worked at the melt pit and the bench and the gate and at midday he set a bowl of soup beside her bin, too salty, and went away again.
In the afternoon Sera came across from the Tern and stood at the end of Mara’s bin with her hands in her jacket pockets, watching her sort.
“I heard about the pipe,” Sera said. “Your hand-cart widow. The whole lane heard.”
“Then the whole lane knows it was my collar.”
Sera considered that. “The whole lane knows a pipe burst and the girl from Rusk’s yard carried water until her arms gave out. That’s what they’re saying at the pump. I listened.” She took one hand out of her pocket and turned the rescue line on her wrist, one turn. “Rescue service has a rule. You don’t get to decide what people remember about a bad night. You only get to decide what you do the next morning.”
Mara put a plate on the scrap pile. “And what did you do, the next morning? After your bad night.”
“Flew freight,” Sera said, and went back to her ship.
At dusk Pell climbed onto the roof.
He did it most evenings when the weather was clear: up the iron ladder on the office wall, across the flat tarred roof of the kitchen, to the low parapet at the far end, where he could sit with his back to the chimney stack and look at the sky. He said it was for watching the patrol lanes. Mara knew it was for the stars. You could see them from the yard roof on a clear night once Hearth had gone down, more of them than you could see from the dormitory, a great pale scatter of points beyond the glow of the district lamps.
She was at the trough washing the day off her hands when he called down.
“Mara! Mara, look.”
She looked up. He was standing, not sitting, at the parapet’s edge, a dark thin shape against the blue-black sky, pointing.
She followed his arm. Low in the south-east, above the dormitory roofs, there was a light among the stars. It was moving.
“It’s a messenger,” Pell said. His voice was high and quick, the way it got when he was excited and trying not to be. “From the Founders. It has to be. It’s not on any lane, it’s not a patrol, look at it, it’s coming straight in.” He leaned out over the parapet. “It flashed. Six times. Maybe seven. I haven’t checked.” A pause. “I was counting but I lost one.”
She dried her hands on her apron and climbed the ladder.
On the roof the air was cold and clear and smelled of tar. She went to the parapet beside him and watched the light. It was bright, brighter than any star, and it was not steady. It wavered as it came. It drifted to one side and then corrected, too sharply, overcorrecting, and drifted again. And it did not slow. A ship coming in to land slowed as it came, the light swelling gently as the engines fought the fall. This light swelled too, but unevenly, in jerks, and it was falling faster, not slower.
She knew that wobble. She had seen it in a crane jib with a cracked pivot, swinging wider with every swing until the jib came down. She had seen it in the Tern’s crooked landing a few days ago, the nose held up by force.
“That’s not a messenger,” she said. “It’s falling.”
Pell turned to look at her.
“It’s a ship,” she said. “In trouble. Look how it wobbles. Look, there, it’s trying to hold its nose up and it can’t.”
The light dropped below the line of the dormitory roofs. For a moment it was hidden. Then, beyond the yard’s back fence, over the abandoned conveyor fields where the old belts lay rusting in long parallel rows across a mile of frozen scrub, the whole sky lit up blue.
A ring of blue fire lifted from the fields. It rose, spreading, a great soft circle of light, and in it, for a moment, every rusted conveyor frame stood out black and sharp as a drawing. The ring rose and thinned and broke.
The sound arrived a breath later, dull and late, a single heavy whump that Mara felt in her chest and in the soles of her feet through the roof, and then the rattle of every shutter in the Low Brace answering it.
Below them, in the yard, the bunk-room door banged open. Arlo came out in his shirt, then Fenno, who had stayed over. They stood staring at the sky over the back fence, where the blue was fading to a dull orange glow, and then they began to run toward the fence.
Far off, to the west, in the Directorate quarter, the sirens began.
They started slowly. One, then another, a long rising wail that took its time to climb. Mara listened to them. She had heard the Directorate’s emergency sirens before, for crop-dome fires and a gas main once on the river flats, and they had always gone up fast and all together, a wall of sound. These went up one at a time. Lazily. As if whoever was sounding them had been expecting the fall and was not much surprised to be asked about it, and saw no reason to hurry.
“Why are they so slow?” Pell said.
She kept quiet. She was counting them, as she had told herself she would count everything tonight: one siren, a long gap, a second, another gap, a third. A wall of sound would have meant they were coming. This meant something else.
Beyond the fence, in the dark, the Tern sat in its bay with its running lights turned low, small red and green points on its wingtips. As Mara watched, a new light came on beneath the ship’s belly: a hard white point, the blue-white of a cutting torch, flaring as someone lit it. The point moved. It went out from under the Tern and across the open ground behind the yard, toward the gap in the back fence, toward the fields and the orange glow, moving fast, the way a person moves when they are running with something heavy.
Sera.
“Mara!” Tavin’s voice, from the yard below. She looked down. He was standing in the kitchen doorway with the lamp light behind him, looking up at her on the roof. “The blanket! Get the fire blanket!”
The fire blanket hung on its hook by the kitchen stove. A big woven blanket, coarse grey stuff, heavy, kept for the melt pit and the forge, for smothering a fire in clothes or a pan of burning oil. She knew exactly where it was. She was already moving before he had finished saying it. Down the ladder two rungs at a time. Across the yard. Past Tavin in the doorway. The blanket on its hook, its rough weave under her hands, its weight over her arm.
She was halfway to the gate before she thought about what she was doing.
“Mara.” Pell’s voice from the roof behind her. She turned and looked up. He was still at the parapet, a dark shape against the stars, leaning out toward the glow. “Is it them? Are the Founders coming to fetch it?”
Whatever was out there, she knew it was a ship and it had fallen and something in her had heard the wobble the way it heard a cracked weld, and she knew that the sirens were slow.
“Keep counting,” she shouted up to him. “Count anything. Count the sirens. And stay on the roof.”
“Why?”
“Because I need you where I can find you.”
She did not wait for an answer. She went out through the gate with the blanket over her arm and turned toward the gap in the back fence, toward the long dark rows of rusting conveyor frames and the orange glow beyond them, and behind her the sirens went on climbing slowly into the night, one after another, as if there were all the time in the world.
Out in the fields, the fire was burning. Someone had been flying that ship. Someone might still be alive inside it. She ran.